Aurora Borealis May 10: A Northern Lights Extravaganza

As a quick update: All of these images were taken on the night of May 10-11, 2024. on San Juan Island WA.  We were taken by surprise in the middle of our vacation when it was announced there was to be an aurora display that would likely be visible from our location.  What an understatement!  What we witnessed was simply out of this world.  We saw colors I did not know existed in the auroras, especially the light pinks and, of all things, orange (neon).   There were four of us on the grounds at the Trumpeter Inn during the "show".  I was the only one with a DSLSR camera so the others would see something interesting and I would point my camera in that direction and take a timed exposer.  Most were in the 15 to 20 second length.  

At one point, Jan looked up straight overhead and saw something that was quite unusual; it looked like some kind of convergence.  I pointed the camera overhead and took this picture, which I find startling.  This was taken with a 16mm wide angle lens that has a 107 degree angle of view which means a pretty big area of the sky is represented in this image.  As an aside, when first looking at the aurora your eyes are seeing mostly in black and white so what you observe looks like white clouds in the sky.  What Jan saw were the apparent white clouds converging.  The reason for this is because the cones in our eyes, the part of the eye that perceives color, are turned off in low light.  You are then seeing with the rods in your eyes and they perceive the color as white.  The camera has no such limitation so it photographs the colors that we cannot see.

Five minutes later I took this image of the same area in the sky as the previous picture.  The aurora is constantly changing and pulsing such that every image you capture is unique.  This is one of my favorite shots of the night in part because of all of the hues it displays but also because it is such a mystery as to why there is such a seeming convergence at this one overhead location.

As the night continued the displays of color kept going.  Above you see the setting moon in the lower left corner.  This image is looking to the northwest.   I was moving all around the grounds at the Trumpeter Inn looking for new compositions.  After getting many mostly sky shots I started searching for possible images with some recognizable foreground interest.  I will share some of those in my next post.  

I hope you enjoy these images.

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